Month: January 2018

Here is a simple way to recover your data.

1) Connect your damaged USB memory stick to your Windows computer.

2) Navigate to the Device Manager. Click on the “plus” sign
beside “Disk Drives”.

3) Then right click on your damaged disk and click on “properties”.

4) Navigate to the “drivers” tab and click “disable”.

5) Insert your USB memory stick back into your Windows system. Go to “Device Manager” again and re-enable the device.

6) The volume containing your data should now appear under “My Computer”.

This is just one fix. Other more advanced problems such as a failed NAND controller can also cause your memory stick not to be recognised by Windows.

Drive Rescue (Dublin, Ireland) offer a complete data recovery service from USB memory stick brands such as PNY, SanDisk, Adata, Sony, Integral, Toshiba and Ativa. We also perform recovery from promotional USB memory sticks.

NAS devices have never been so popular. They consume less power than a PC or server, they support RAID and their compactness means they can be stored in even the most space deprived homes or offices. While first generation NAS devices were basically conjoined hard disks with a built-in networking component, modern NAS devices are much more sophisticated. Most come equipped with their own operating system such as DSM (for Synology) or QTS as used by Qnap. Most NAS devices also support file sharing protocols such as SMB and NFS, which make them ideal for OS-agnostic environments.

Even though most NAS devices support RAID redundancy, it is surprising how many users forsake this safety net in lieu of performance by setting up their devices in a RAID 0 configuration.

Recently, we helped a user to recover files from his Synology NAS DS216 configured in RAID 0. Inside the array were two Western Digital Disks – a 1.5TB disk (WD15EARS) and a 2TB disk (WD20EZRX). Our diagnostics revealed that the latter disk had firmware issues. Once these were resolved, we imaged both disks. Using both disk images, we rebuilt the RAID 0 using its original parameters. The file system used was EXT4.
We recovered over 2TB of Final Cut Pro 9 (. fcp) files along with .MOV and.AVI files. – everything which the client needed.

In this case, the user made the mistake of using RAID 0 but can you spot the second mistake from the photo above? He also used two WD Green disks. For NAS devices, this is another common technical faux pas. “Eco-class” disks and many standard “desktop-class” disks do not support TLER (time limited error recovery) functionality needed to minimise errors on a RAID environment. “NAS-class” disks such as WD’s NASware disks or HGST’s Deskstar NAS disks are recommended. But perhaps the greatest step the user could have taken was to have his data backed up! Apps in Synology’s DSM facilitate this as well as third party apps such as BackBlaze B2 or using OS apps such as Resilio.

You have a Microsoft Office file (such as Word, Excel, etc) which you (or your user) have been working on all week. But now, for whatever reason, the file has either gone corrupt or been over-written.

Hours of work wasted? Maybe not. In Windows, the quickest recovery route possible is the much forgotten and underused feature called Shadow Copy. The steps to recovery are easy. 1) Right-click the overwritten or corrupted file and click ‘Properties’. 2) Select ‘Previous Versions’. 3) If you want to view the old version, click ‘View’. To copy the old version to another location, simply click ‘Copy’ and you’re done. The quickest data recovery ever!

Generally speaking good quality CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW are a fairly reliable backup medium. This is assuming, however, that they’re kept out of direct UV sunlight and are kept free from deep scratches. But, occasionally user error can result in data loss. Like a gentleman from Kildare we helped last week. He had an Outlook .PST file from his old workplace which he had stored on a Maxell DVD-RW. He inadvertently performed a “quick format” on the disc, erroneously thinking a different disc was in his DVD tray. His heart sunk as he thought that 9 years’ worth of emails and contacts we now gone into the ether. He contacted us.

The data recovery process for this type of data loss is cut and dry. Firstly, we configured the read-speed settings on our DVD reader to read at the slowest possible speed and then ran a utility IsoBuster called on his disc. This recovered his .PST file quickly. However, when this file imported into Outlook, it still would not read. The error “outlook.pst is not an outlook data file” appeared. So, we ran SCANPST on the folder and re-tried. (SCANPST is a utility built into Windows OS to repair minor errors in .PST files). The utility found some errors which it repaired. The second import of the .PST file worked with all the client’s contacts and old emails now appearing. A very quick data recovery case! I hope this post helps someone else who has experienced the same problem.

Drive Rescue Data Recovery are based in Dublin, Ireland. We recover data from most brands of hard disk including Seagate, Toshiba, WD, Samsung, Iomega, LaCie, Intenso, Adata and Transcend. Find out more on: www.datarecoverydublin.ie